Referees’ chief Pat McEnaney admits players may contrive a black card to avoid being suspended for the Championship.

Laois footballer Colm Begley raised the issue earlier this week when pointing out that players who have picked up two black cards approaching the tail end of the League may deliberately incur another one to ensure they have a clean slate going into the Championship.

Players who pick up three black cards over the course of a League and Championship season will serve a one-match ban with the new caution being introduced from January.

“You see it in soccer where they accumulate,” said McEnaney, chairman of the National Referees’ Committee.

“I know a fella in Division One of the English League, he used to always accumulate three cards before Christmas so that he’d be suspended for the Christmas period and get home. We can’t eradicate that – yes it’s possible, yeah.”

McEnaney and a team of officials have been moving from county to county in recent weeks bringing referees up to speed on how to implement the black card.

“We’re very confident with that because 11 of the Championship referees were in the roll-out for the new rules.

"They were giving the seminars themselves, along with another fella who was not a referee. I was included in that, I was with Joe McQuillan.

“We had Cormac Reilly out, David Coldrick, all the lads were out.

"They’ve also presented as well so they’ve had four or five different counties throwing questions at them, so I’m quite confident they’ll be well ready.

“You can train all you like, as any footballer or hurler will tell you, but you need matches. It’s no different.”

Inter-county panels have also been briefed, with McEnaney explaining: “I’ve covered about four counties teams already, and they ask far less questions.

"They just say, ‘Give me the facts here, Pat and let’s get on with it’.

“With the referees, you can take an hour and 15 to 20 minutes because they get into the detail.

"It takes much longer than explaining the new rules to referees than to players.

"You do it in about 35 to 40 minutes; bang, that’s the message, get out.”

The former All-Ireland final ref says he has encountered no hostility from teams on the black card.

McEnaney admits that a certain amount of simulation has crept into Gaelic football and that players may try and trick a referee into giving a black card by going to ground for something relatively innocuous such as pulling a jersey.

“The problem you’ve now got as a player is that you can pull someone’s jersey, and he decides to go to ground, you have taken the decision-making out of your hands. You’ve thrown that decision to a referee to make.

“What I’m saying is that, if you pull a fella’s jersey and he goes to ground, the referee has then got to make a decision: is that a deliberate pull-down or is it not? To me, I always say to players that you have taken that decision out of your hands and given it to somebody else.”